基于托管机制的拼车平台司机定位和激励机制
Driver Positioning and Incentive Budgeting with an Escrow Mechanism for Ridesharing Platforms
摘要：
Lyft拼车平台上的司机并不总是能实时的知道供应短缺的地区在哪里。这种信息的缺乏伤害了试图找到一个乘坐和司机试图确定如何最大限度地提高他们的收入机会的车手。Lyft的个人权力区（PPZ）产品通过实时的影响司机的空间分布，鼓励他们重新定位车辆，帮助公司在平台上保持高水平的服务。为该产品提供动力的底层系统有两个主要组成部分：（1）一个新颖的“托管机制”，它可以实时的跟踪与城市内位置相关的可用激励预算;（2）一个算法，它可以解决随机驾驶员定位问题，以最大限度地提高乘客票价的短期收入。优化问题是一个多智能体的动态规划，太复杂，我们的大规模应用程序的最佳解决方案。我们的方法是将其分解为两个子问题。第一个决定了激励的驱动因素，以及激励他们定位自己的位置。第二个决定如何使用托管预算为每个激励提供资金。通过将其公式化为两个凸规划，我们能够使用商业求解器在几秒钟内找到最佳解决方案。该系统在一年多一点的时间内推广到Lyft运营的所有320个城市，现在产生了数百万的奖金，激励数十万活跃的司机每周在预期的乘车请求中进行最佳定位。总之，PPZ产品及其底层算法代表了Lyft司机在平台上驾驶和创收方式的范式转变。其直接的业务影响是增量预订增加了0.5%，每年达到数千万美元。
英文摘要：
Drivers on the Lyft rideshare platform do not always know where the areas of supply shortage are in real time. This lack of information hurts both riders trying to find a ride and drivers trying to determine how to maximize their earnings opportunity. Lyft's Personal Power Zone (PPZ) product helps the company to maintain high levels of service on the platform by influencing the spatial distribution of drivers in real time via monetary incentives that encourage them to reposition their vehicles. The underlying system that powers the product has two main components: (1) a novel 'escrow mechanism' that tracks available incentive budgets tied to locations within a city in real time, and (2) an algorithm that solves the stochastic driver positioning problem to maximize short-run revenue from riders' fares. The optimization problem is a multiagent dynamic program that is too complicated to solve optimally for our large-scale application. Our approach is to decompose it into two subproblems. The first determines the set of drivers to incentivize and where to incentivize them to position themselves. The second determines how to fund each incentive using the escrow budget. By formulating it as two convex programs, we are able to use commercial solvers that find the optimal solution in a matter of seconds. Rolled out to all 320 cities in which Lyft's operates in a little over a year, the system now generates millions of bonuses that incentivize hundreds of thousands of active drivers to optimally position themselves in anticipation of ride requests every week. Together, the PPZ product and its underlying algorithms represent a paradigm shift in how Lyft drivers drive and generate earnings on the platform. Its direct business impact has been a 0.5% increase in incremental bookings, amounting to tens of millions of dollars per year.
机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来，可能存在错误，请以论文正文为准。
